U.S. Dept of Energy’s EECBG/SEP Technical Assistance Program Webinar Page 1 of 23
Leveraging Partnerships with Faith-Based Organizations
Richard Faesy, Reverend Fletcher Harper, Paul Raver, Alexis Chase
Richard: Good afternoon and welcome to the webinar this afternoon on Leveraging Partnerships with Faith-Based Organizations. This is Richard Faesy with Energy Futures Group and part of Team 4. I’ll explain a little bit about who we are as part of the DOE’s Technical Assistance Network, but first I would like to introduce out three speakers today.
And actually, before I do that, I just want to let everybody know that the webinar this afternoon will be about an hour long, we hope to leave 10 or 15 minutes at the end for questions. Feel free to type questions into the box on your dashboard and I’ll be reviewing those after the three presenters have walked through their case studies and read those out to the presenters; they will answer them at the end. So feel free to ask questions at any point during the presentation but we’re going to hold until the end to answer those so we can make sure to get through all three presentations.
There will also be a survey that comes out to all attendees at the end of the webinar so please take a few minutes and answer that if you would, it will real help us and DOE get a sense of how this went, how useful it was, and in providing any feedback for future events.
So, without further ado, I’d like to present our three speakers today, Reverend Fletcher Harper, who’s an Episcopal Priest, who’s the Executive Director of Green Faith, an interfaith environmental coalition based in New Jersey, an award winning spiritual writer and nationally-recognized preacher on the environment. He has developed a range of innovative programs to make Green Faith a leader in the religious-environmental movement. A graduate of Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary, Harper served as a parish priest for ten years prior to joining Green Faith
He was named 2006 Environmental Leader of the Year by then New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner, Lisa Jackson, and accepts the Green Faith’s Many Faith’s One Earth Award from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2009.
So, founded in 1992 Green Faith inspires, educates and mobilizes people of diverse religious backgrounds as environmental leaders through religious-environment education programs by creating the operation of religious institutions in the homes of their members through legislative advocacy and values-based environmental activism, Green Faith helps religious institutions and people of all faiths put their beliefs into action for the Earth.
So, Reverend Fletcher Harper will be our first speaker and followed by Paul C. Raver Jr. Paul Raver is cofounder and President of Green Market Solutions, a company that markets and promotes energy efficiency and renewable programs to residential and commercial markets and partnerships with investor-owned utilities and State and local governments. Green Market Solutions, or GMS, offers services focused on transforming energy markets including audit, retrofit implementation services, compact florescent lamps, lead generation, focused outreach services and strategic consulting services.
At Green Market Solutions Mr. Raver has primary responsibility for new business development and client relationship management. Prior to founding GMS, Paul was a manager at Alvarez and Marshall specializing in forensic accounting analysis related to matters of bankruptcy, litigation due diligence. Paul received a Bachelor of Science in finance from Indiana University, a Master of Business Administration for the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, a Master’s Course in International Studies from the Lauder Institute of U. Penn as well.
Paul serves on the Policy Committee of Midwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, MEEA, who is one of the Team 4 members and the advisory board of Lake Front Capital Fund LP, a real estate partnership investing multi-family residential real estate properties in the Greater Chicago/Illinois Metropolitan area.
So, Paul Raver will be our second speaker and followed by our Alexis Chase. Alexis Chase is with Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, a staff person who joined in September 2008 as the Outreach Communication Director and stepped in as interim executive director in August 2009.
She was hired as the Executive Director in February 2010. Alexis received her Bachelor of Arts from Tufts University in 2000 and earned a Master of Divinity from San Francisco Theological Seminary in 2006. Alexis is a member of St. Luke Episcopal Church in Atlanta.
So, we’ll hear three perspectives this morning – or, I’m sorry – this afternoon, but first I will just do a little bit of overview of what we hope to accomplish and a little bit about the DOE’s Technical Assistance Project.
So, as you probably know from having signed up for this, this webinar is going to explore how faith-based organizations or partners are using energy efficiency as an organizing motivator to retrofit both the institutional buildings and the members’ homes as well. So, the three programs I mentioned in New Jersey, Maryland and Georgia are going to represent their models and experience in leveraging faith-based organizations to save energy.
So, what is the technical assistance project? For those of you who have attended earlier webinars, I’m sorry if this is repeating, but we want to just make sure that people are aware of the program and what’s available out there.
DOE’s Technical Assistance Program, or TAP, supports the stimulus-funded grantees from the energy efficiency and conservation block grant program on the community scale and the State energy program by providing State, local and tribal offices, tools, resources and technical assistance to promote their clean energy program.
There’s quite a bit that can be offered, including one-on-one assistance for programs or grantees who have needs or questions. There’s quite an extensive online resource at DOE’s Solution Center website. This includes past webinars, this webinar as well will be recorded and posted up on the website within a week or so. Events and calendars of future webinars and events, there’s a blog and quite a few best practices and project resource available there.
So this covers, really, all topics that might be of interest to State and local communities, including energy efficiency, renewable transportation is part of that as well, program design, implementation, financing and performance contracting.
More detail here than I’m going to walk through but within each of those major topic areas – on the technical side, program design and implementation, financial and performance contracting – there’s quite a bit of expertise that this team can bring to grantees. The particular team that I’m involved with, called Team 4, is involved with delivering the program design and implementation, this is lead by the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation and includes partnerships with all of the regional energy sufficiency support organizations that are listed here.
So, we are providing – we’ve got a network of expertise across the country and we will – if you’re interested and need assistance – technical assistance – you would contact through the Solution Center – there’s a process for engaging and we would line you up with a local resource, or if they don’t have the expertise somebody within the team would, so this is a great resource to tap into if you haven’t already.
So, with that I am going to move things over to Fletcher Harper and he will be starting – I’m just giving him the rights to the mouse and keyboard here. We’re going to be – after the webinar overview which I’ve just gone through – Fletcher’s going to walk us through the Green Faith and Green Market Solutions along with Paul Raver; they’re going to be sharing the first two case studies and then Alexis Chase will be talking about Georgia Interfaith Power and Light.
With that, I’ll turn things over to Reverend Fletcher Harper.
Reverend Harper: Thank you very much, Richard, I appreciate it and appreciate the opportunity to be with everybody today. A couple of words of introduction, briefly, about GreenFaith and also about Green Market Solutions; GreenFaith is an inter-faith environmental coalition. We’re geographically based in New Jersey but we also function and have programs that are national in scope.
And what I want to do is – after giving a very brief intro, both to our work and Green Market Solutions’ work – take you through four different projects that we’ve worked on, which I think are relevant in today’s discussion; one being some work we’ve done with solar power, one being some work that we’ve done with compact florescent light bulb distribution, one being a partnership with a utility, and the final being one that is the newest on the block in concert with agencies in Maryland and Delaware.
And, as part of the sort of approach that we’ve taken, we have consistently relied on partnerships with other leaders, in particular with Green Market Solutions, and Paul Raver, my colleague at Green Market Solutions, is on the line now. And Paul, perhaps you could say just a couple of sentences to introduce Green Market Solutions.
Paul Raver: Sure, thanks Fletcher. Yeah, just too briefly introduce Green Market Solutions; we’re a national energy services company that focuses on the implementation and marketing of energy efficiency programs, typically in partnership with utilities and State government. To date we’ve worked primarily on the East Coast and in the Midwest where we’re based. In addition today we’ll definitely discus our role in helping implement and market home energy audit and retrofit programs, which are typically known as Home Performance with ENERGY STAR Programs throughout the U.S.
Reverend Fletcher: All right, thanks Paul. Richard I’m not – I don’t seem to be able to advance the slides, so, if you have control it would be wonderful if you could advance two slides ahead now. Thanks.
Perfect, thank you. One of our earliest projects in relationship to engaging a range of religious institutions on energy-related issues – not solely from an educational or advocacy perspective but from the perspective of really putting what they believe into action – was around the topic of solar power.
As many of you know, the New Jersey Clean Energy Program through the State Board of Public Utilities had a very aggressive solar rebate program back – starting in 2003 – and we were able – in partnership with a solar installer named Sun Farm Network – to have solar arrays installed in 25 different faith-based sites.
The total – the numbers – are not enormous. And one of, I think, the characteristics of the faith-based sector in relationship to solar is that often times the average project size is quite small compared to the size of projects that commercial installers and commercial financing groups are accustomed to financing and supporting.
But what we found, very consistently, was that these faith-based installations generated a very substantial amount of publicity – community awareness, regional media coverage – because it was such an odd-bedfellows kind of experience and an innovative experience for people to see this cutting-edge technology, relatively speaking, up on buildings that were, relatively speaking, fairly old in many cases.
In this particular partnership, the way that it worked effectively was that GreenFaith and Sun Farm Network had distinct responsibilities; GreenFaith played the role of identifying and then prequalifying and supporting timely decision making within the faith-based sites that we worked with. To identify the 25 faith-based sites we had to speak with over 110. We found that sometimes the faith-based sites that were most enthusiastic didn’t have appropriate roofs for solar array and sometimes those that had the best roofs weren’t particularly interested.
So, our job was to identify those that fit both of those criteria, and then to make sure that they were able to move their decision-making process along in a timely way. We also did a lot of educational outreach about the New Jersey Clean Energy Program and the solar rebates that it was offering.
And we received a small grant from the Department of Energy’s Million Solar Roofs program, which funded some addition workshops and outreach through a variety of religiously-based institutions around the State of New Jersey.
The role that Sun Farm Network played was that they provided the engineering and procurement – the EPC – function. And they also provided financing for the remaining 30 to 40 percent of the project that the State rebate program did not pay for. We found that having the capacity there to finance 100 percent of the project was almost a complete requirement with faith-based groups, many of which are on extremely tight budgets and have no way to afford a capital outlay for a solar project.
And we’re currently ramping up efforts again with several different financing and EPC partners to do more solar work, not only in New Jersey but beyond.
I think the particular leverage points that working with the faith community offers in this regard – in regards to solar – is the relatively high visibility of these institutions within their communities.
These institutions have a lot of traffic, not only of their own members but of other non-profit and community groups that use their facilities, and that makes them very effective centers of community awareness and education. There’s clearly a morale suasion benefit to working with non-profits or faith-based institutions.
And there’s a substantial opportunity for citizen education in an outreach and for well-designed, sort of marketing and promotion of, not only solar power, but a wide range of other energy efficiency and conservation opportunities as well.